This invention relates to an oxygenator device used for surgery of chests and more particularly to an artificial lung.
There have theretofore been employed oxygenator devices of disk type, membrane type, sheet type and hard shell type. The sheet type and hard shell type artificial lungs are bubble type devices which have been widely used lately. Such conventional bubble type artificial lungs are disadvantageous in that they cannot provide a satisfactory oxygenation and tends to cause a problem regarding the oxygenation efficiency, and also at the time of extra-corporial circulation at high flow rates, the amount of oxygen at high flow rates of blood will increase with increases in the blood's extra-corporial circulation quantity as compared with those at low flow rates thus creating a remarkable decrease in oxygenation efficiency. Further, such devices are unsatisfactory as an artificial lung in that a proper ratio of mixing blood and oxygen cannot always be obtained and exceeding the proper mixing ratio will cause a hemolytic problem.